Getting started
Setting your print defaults
Your cutter, your blade and your substrate do not change between jobs. Set the numbers that describe them once, in Settings, and every new job starts there.
3 min read
A shop that mostly traces one kind of artwork sets the same two or three values on every file. Settings → Print defaults is where those stop being typed. It is what a machine profile amounts to here: the numbers a new job starts at, before anybody touches a slider.
What the defaults cover
The page splits into two groups, and the split is the point. The first group is preferences — a shop that traces watercolour all day wants a higher alpha cut every time.
| Setting | Ships at | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Alpha cut | 128 | Alpha level counted as artwork. Raise it to shed spatter or glow. |
| Minimum area | 0.02 | Drop components smaller than this fraction of the largest one. |
| Opening | 0.8 mm | Removes fur, hair, whiskers, spines and web strands — anything thinner than this. Careful where thin is the subject. |
| Relief | 0 mm | Minimum inside-corner radius. 0 follows the edge exactly. |
| Background tolerance | 16 | Only used when the artwork has no transparency. |
| Edge smoothing | 0.5 mm | Raise it when the traced edge is noisy. |
| Curve fit tolerance | 0.25 mm | How far the fitted curve may sit from the traced edge. |
The three that are held behind a switch
Page clearance, stroke weight and cutline offset sit in a second group with a lock on it. They are not preferences: they are house rules from the print spec, and moving one changes what arrives at the cutter rather than how a silhouette is measured.
Unlock the group deliberately and the fields open. Move any of them off 2 cm, 3 pt and 0 mm and the page says, in as many words, that new jobs will no longer match the print spec — with the three numbers they will carry instead.
The blade offset is the one worth measuring
It ships at 0, which means the cut sits exactly on the artwork edge. Cutters drift a millimetre or two, so on the edge is a white sliver one way and a clipped edge the other. Which number is right depends on your machine, your blade and your material — nothing in a file can tell you.
Run a test cut, find the number where you get neither, and save it here. On the job itself the tuner offers the same decision as three presets — inside the art at −2 mm, on the edge at 0, a white border at +2 mm — with the millimetre field underneath.
The shape screen ships at 0 as well, so a piece cut from a drawn shape and the same piece traced from artwork start on the same line. The sign matters more than the number: negative pulls the blade into the print, positive puts it in blank paper past the edge of the artwork.
What is deliberately not a default
- Cut off the bottom. How much spec label to discard is a fact about one file, never a house rule.
- The weeding box. A box is a decision about one sheet at the bench.
- Second surface. Which side of the glass a decal is read from is a fact about one order.
All three live on the job instead, where they belong.
What cannot be changed at all
The bottom of the page lists two things as read-only, because people ask. The filename pattern is NAME_Hh_Wb.pdf, and the spot colour name is CutContour. Your RIP matches on that exact word: get it wrong and the cut path prints as magenta ink instead of driving the cutter, so it is not offered as a setting.
The Illustrator layer of the same name is cosmetic and is renameable at the command line; the separation is not, and never travels with it.
Saving, and going back
Only the values you have moved off their shipped setting are stored. If one of the shipped numbers changes later, it still reaches anybody who never overrode it. A single button puts everything back.
At the command line: .cutlinerc
Drawn shapes read a .cutlinerc file beside the artwork, so a settled offset and stroke are typed once. One key = value per line, # for a comment, and each key is the name of a setting:
# house defaults
offset = -2
stroke = 3
It is read from the artwork's own folder upward and the nearest one wins, so a client folder can hold its own. Anything typed on the command line beats it, it reports what it applied rather than changing things silently, and Ignore saved defaults ignores it entirely. It belongs to drawn shapes; the tracer does not read it.
Try it on your own artwork
Upload a file and read the preflight before you quote.